Viral marketing can make magic for any type of web site, business, or product. It has the potential to be a huge source for sales leads, targeted traffic, and on-way links. Surprisingly, tons of marketers are not taking the full benefits of this viral factor within their marketing efforts.

Most marketers deem viral marketing a myth, or an Internet folly that works once in a blue moon when an amazing product or web site turns up.

Realistically, viral marketing techniques can be applied to any type of web site, either big or small. These techniques can be used by anybody who is willing to put in the time put in use a few simple steps. Viral marketing that is done right can have amazing benefits, such as:

-build your brand or name recognition
-enhance your one way link popularity
-boost targeted traffic to your site
-automate your marketing attempts

Here are a few straightforward viral marketing techniques that you can try out on your web site, business, or product:

1. Spread the Word
Everyone has seen what word of mouth can do for all types of products. It is amazing what happens when people talk about a great gadget or movie and out of no where everybody knows all about it. It is in our human nature to tell everybody we know about any kind of amazing product we have found or bought. So, why not go ahead and take advantage of it?

Placing a straightforward “Tell a Friend” form on your web site is an easy way for your visitors to spread the word about your web site. Many internet marketers do not take advantage of this type of form. You can do the same thing to all of your newsletters, services, product, or any other aspect of your web site… at the end of all copies just add a few sentences asking nicely for your visitors to refer their friends if they found your service, site, or product helpful or useful.

2. Brand Your Site
It is very important to have some sort of logo on your product or web site. Branding all of your stuff is dire for people to take notice and become interested. Having a captivating brand name can be thought as a very “viral technique” within itself; so try to think of something that catches attention and has an original ring to it.

Branding gives people a clear picture of your product or site. People distinguish brands, so include your logo or brand on everything that is being produced from your business.

3. Ebooks
Knowledgeable marketers have sprung onto this new creation very quickly; they recognize the “viral” power that eBooks have to a business.

Ebooks are simply electronic documents that anyone can download from any type of web site and can be circulated around the web. Webmasters or marketers can also re-brand eBooks with their very own links. Ebooks that have high quality information get passed around the web extremely quickly and are amazing viral tools.

Anybody can go ahead and write their own eBook on the topic of their web site. For someone that is not writer savvy they can get permission to exploit a collection of articles that have already been written from the multiple article directories around the web. Two very popular article directories are: www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com. Software for eBook compiling is pretty cheap and you can usually find it for free on the internet.

4. Viral Marketing Software
Many effortless software applications and products can be extremely viral and are often handed around or downloaded via the internet by thousands every day. These products are always something that most user’s desire: organizers, ecalenders, link checking software, personal planners, and so on. Most are simple desktop goods that stay on the user’s computer desktop, which happens to b e the most important location in the marketing stadium.

The preeminent examples of viral marketing software always have the business’s logo, contact email, and sales message…. All include live links to each of the above…. Which happens to be conveniently displayed somewhere within the product. Software programs such as these can be extremely useful viral promotional devices that can expand quickly throughout the web.

5. RSS
RSS is the newest addition to viral marketing techniques. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is an awesome viral marketing tool. RSS was originally used by many news crews to syndicate all of their news stories. It is also connected to Blogs since the use an RSS feed to hand out their content. RSS feeds that have a high quality are selected and put on display by a variety of different sites all over the internet.

If you have yet to gear up for RSS you should get started. You can simply use a site such as blogger.com (possessed by Google) which will provide you with a basic blog and RSS feed, so you can extend your product and/or message to targeted parties.

6. Video Seeding
Create videos utilizing popular video generation software such as Camtasia Studio.  Camtasa enables you to produce killer screen recording videos how to videos, product reviews, etc.  With an informative video posted (called seeding) to a popular video web site such as YouTube, MetCafe etc you can watch your traffic explode.

These are just a few viral marketing techniques out there that can help you increase your presence on the web, boost your traffic, and amplify your links. When used properly, these techniques will jump start your web site and spread it all over the internet and around the world.

Platform-A, http://www.platform-a.com, AOL’s digital advertising division, recently announced the launch of an affiliate marketing solution that links the buy.at affiliate network to the widget-based marketing tools of wildly popular Goowy Media, Inc.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years…Goowy Media, Inc. develops innovative online products and services that provide simple, intuitive tools for managing your digital life and expressing yourself on the web.  Their most popular products are yourminus.com and goowy webtop

This progressive move by AOL enables web publishers, like you and me, to generate additional revenue from a combination of affiliate, widget and viral marketing.  It will be exciting to see how Platform-A advertisers integrate/syndicate this new capability into their customized widgets for your blog, website, and even your desktop!  Very cool stuff indeed.

For more than a little while now I haven’t had too many good things to say about these blasted Widgets!  They seemed to just take up real advertising space and bleed my hard-earned web traffic.  However, I will gladly test these viral advertiser generated widgets out on my network of blogs/sites so my visitors and customers can snatch them up and redistribute them to the far corners of the Web.  Just think about the applications…MySpace, FaceBook, etc.

Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A states, “This solution combines the best of affiliate and widget advertising in a solution that benefits publishers and advertisers alike.  Publisher revenue potential, brand exposure for the advertiser, and potential conversions grow virally each time the widget is downloaded by a consumer.”

I agree Lynda!  Now this is what we collectively mean by the moniker Web 2.0 people!

http://www.Top-Affiliate.com
http://www.FreeAdvertisingBlog.com

I read an EXCELLENT post tonight on an experimental project on Marketing Experiments.  The focus of their project was “Can Viral Video Clips Drive Targted Traffic”

From the recent explosion of YouTube and Google Videos as of late I was pretty sure I knew the answer.  However, the bottom line dollars and sense outcome of their ongoing experiment was a real eye opener to the efficiency of viral video marketing.

They seeded a total of 28 videos on the web for their experiment.  Here are their results in comparison to what it would have cost them to acquire prospects via PPC advertising:
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What you need to understand: Although the video clips had no promotional message or content, 1.49% of viewers went on to become newsletter subscribers. In Just 60 Days, our videos were viewed over 324,000 times at no cost to us.

KEY POINT: With no additional work or money spent, we are projected to generate 382,444 views for October, which is more than we generated in the previous 2 months combined.

:: To create a context for these video clip results, we built a comparison chart to see how much it would cost to achieve the same results using Pay Per Click advertising.

These figures are based on the same number of views, the same clickthrough rates and the same conversion to subscribers. With regard to cost per click, we assumed a mid-range price of 30 cents.

Viral marketing has been around for quite some time but only in the last few years has it fully been recognized as a serious marketing medium.  Viral marketing campaigns such as viral videos and viral games are relatively cheap to produce and produce.  However, the right viral marketing campaign can potentially reach millions of potential prospects as they are passed along.

Viral marketing campaigns are really only designed to do one thing.  GET PEOPLE TALKING.  If you’re like me you get these videos or games from your family, friends, co-workers, etc. all the time.  Since they’re being sent to you by someone you know you are already receptive to viewing/playing them and passing them on to your sphere of influence.  It is this reason alone that make s viral marketing the most unobtrusive form of advertising on the NET today.

Successful viral marketing campaigns make a strong connection with their target audience while sutly integrating the brand into the content.  Advertisers make this connection by developing viral marketing campaigns that may be risqué, controversial or shocking to arouse interest.  And with the rise of popular seeding (how you launch your viral campaign) sites such as YouTube.com, KontraBand.com and MetCafe.com,  to name a few, getting your viral marketing campaign circulated to the masses takes mere days or weeks.

Here’s a great example of a viral video I came across while doing some research for my own viral marketing site http://www.EMTactics.com, which is still under development:

Most businesses already have a marketing budget or should.  However, how much if any has gone towards launching your first viral marketing campaign?  Give it a try, the public demands it =)